Oh oh....

JUDGE CURLEY THE HEAD BK JUDGE IN AZ JUST RULED MINUTES AGO THAT THE BANK OF NEW YORK MELLON MUST PRODUCE THE CUSTODIAL RECORDS IN THEIR VAULT IN A CASE AGAINST AN AZ HOMEOWNER, THEREBY PRODUCING THE NOTE AND ALL OTHER DOCS.

THIS IS A TRANSFORMATIONAL DECISION. 

Now we're cooking.  This decision changes literally everything - at least for Arizona.  If it spreads, and it probably will, it will change everything period.

If BONY doesn't have the documentation in their custody, with proper endorsements, then there's gonna be trouble.  You can bet the banks will try to bury notice of this way off the front page, but they're not going to get away with it.

The key issue here has always been whether the people buying these securities were really buying what they thought they were - and maybe whether they were buying anything at all.

If BONY can't produce the documents because they don't have them, and cannot prove up ownership of the note with proper endorsements, the lid is going to come off this thing.

The funny part of this, as Yves over at Naked Capitalism has noted, is this:

..... that they gave multiple certifications to the investors in the mortgage securtizations that they did indeed have the trust assets. If, as it now appears to be the case, that many mortgage loans were not properly conveyed to the trust (as in endorsed by the originator and all the intermediary parties specified in the contract governing the deal, the pooling and servicing agreement, and finally over to the trust), then all those certifictions were patently untrue. Since investors relied upon these certifications (no one in their right mind would have ponied up for these deals if they had had any doubt that the trust owned the mortgage loans) and the failure to convey the notes is a big cause of problems with foreclosures, it would seem that the trustees are very logical targets for investor litigation.

Yeah and the fun part is that being a Trustee is a fairly low-dollar thing.  That is, the exposure here is all out of whack with the potential profit.  If the Trustee is held accountable for the losses that have accrued to the investors, well, then we're talking about major trouble.

The Trustee is the one who provided a certification on these matters.  And as I have repeatedly pointed out, under NY Trust Law, which nearly all of these things are registered under, you cannot transfer in bearer paper - each loan must be endorsed specifically to the trust.

The game is afoot and the odds of us seeing something like this in the banking world just went up a lot.